Cuil Search Engine Comes Out of the Gate Stumbling

According to cuil.com’s homepage at the time this article was written, the Cuil search engine indexes an astounding 121,617,892,992 web pages. The question is how they are indexed. Backed by big brains and bigger bucks, Cuil (pronounced “cool”) launched last night and was hardly welcomed with the parades and fanfare it was surely hoping for. In fact, we can’t recall the last time a product received this much bad press within 24 hours of its launch. Most would be overjoyed by not one, not two, but three consecutive articles on Techcrunch, not to mention the hundreds of other articles on blogs across the internet. Unfortunately it seems as though not many people had anything good to say. Search is a tricky space since Google swallowed it years ago and bloggers would typically root for the underdog as opposed to writing a young scrapper off immediately, but it might just be too hard to root for Cuil. Traffic to cuil.com may end up being the biggest bell curve we’ve ever seen. It has a great look and some interesting features but downtime, skepticism and perhaps worst of all, consistently bad search results have dug a hole that Cuil may never be able to climb out of. Come on guys; when we search “Cuil” we don’t get a single result about the site! Just about every search we ran yielded pretty terrible results, even our search for “Boy Genius Report” as seen in the image above. Well, maybe we’ll be the 121,617,892,993rd page indexed…

Hey I just got results for Boy Genius Report and it was even a suggestion. This does not change the fact that it will not take the place of Google. I mean Google is a verb. You can’t say well just Cuil it.

So I will just continue my Googling… lol!

ChrisNYC

I tried “CAKE Pressue” for the album Pressure Chief, and Cuil gave me zero responses, WTF.

Google gave 13,300 responses.

Not Cuil. ;)

matefive

It finds results now “45,743,803 results for boy genius report”.
Was the same with a few other sites I searched for: seems like it adds them after you searched for them once.

ChrisNYC

typo, I did type “CAKE Pressure”

Stanovoy

Apparently, if you wanted to find out more about Cuil.com, i.e. by clicking on “About Cuil”, you will learn that “Cuil” is “Oops! We couldn’t find that page. Please verify that the URL is correct and try again.” Maybe that’s why cuil.com wouldn’t show up in its own search :P

Gauntlet Down

Perhaps the lack of hit is a commentary on BGR rather than on Cuil?

Stanovoy

@Sean

“Google” was not a word until Google came into being. So maybe 5 years down the road, we would be “cuiling” stuff constantly ;)

Yeah, right. Google gives 395,000 results for “boy genius report”. So it is a commentary on Cuil. Maybe you didn’t know BGR is a leading tech site – Google does.

I would like to wish these guys at Cuil all the luck in the world, but what were they thinking with their big publicity push? They are not ready for prime time, or any time. I checked my key words – NOTHING shows up. Not just my site – no one, nothing. The entire category is empty.

They had their one big chance and they have blown it. It will be interesting to see if they have any public response to all the negative press.

MadMike

What’s this Boy Genius Report you speak of? Never heard of it… ;-)

Anyway, I don’t care if I get 20 or 200,000 results as long as they are what I want. Google does great some times. Others, you get a lot of crappola. Like I’ve been looking for a great cell phone & mobile news blog for a while now run by some sort of super-ninja. Only if one existed… Wouldn’t that be something…

Anyway, I guess Cuil just sucks. And whats with making up words? This isn’t ebonics yo! Youtz zhizzles cantz junks makes up werds and stuff yo Homie G Yo Yo Ma – Izzle needles togo to college and learn english!

ycrazyy

I will have to agree that this place was not ready for prime time. Typed in my company name and found 0 search results. Tried some variations and came up with things that were only VERY vaguely similar. Site needs a lot of work before it’s ready to be a true competitor.

stan

just tried it … works now.
-s

man_dem

@ ycrazyy

probably because your company is small time..

stan

never mind … i am loosing my mind.
-s

Tristan

You need to search “boygeniusreport” and you get plenty of results. I guess it is not able to recognize search words other then ones in website form ie.”boygeniusreport.com”.

Jeff F

ask.com is a good choice or goodsearch.com

phonedude

Maybe it’s because people read Crackberry or Engadget more. You know sites that are riddled with egotistical articles?

dondgc

Weird. Now it has gone from zero to 412,000 results – but the results all seem to have the same few images attached (no matter whether the image is from the site or not). I have not found my site yet but I did find an image from my site linked to someone else’s result.

miklm

As ycrazyy said, I just tried some searches for our family’s company, a company I consult for, and my personal website, all with “No results for …”, while they are the top result each time for the same Google search.

When Google debuted in 1998 as a beta, I took one look at it and said it would change the face of the Internet, and immediately changed all my searches from Yahoo and AltaVista to Google. Well, I’m looking deep into that crystal ball again, and calling this one vaporware.

http://Stuff Cuil This!

I did a search on a famous criminal and a supermodel and got the ‘can’t be found’ message. I noticed that ‘safe search’ under preferences is on by default. I turned it off and my searches started to work. Also, I wonder if the site’s getting overloaded, because after 3mins, no results were coming up after a full minutes. I went back to the main page, researched and after a minute nothing came up. Eh!

http://www.darkfiberla.com Dan

Pretty sad, i searched for darkfiberla which is my website and i am #1, #2, #3, and #4, on google but nothing even shows up on “cool”.

Chris

Also… slow to load the first time, which was annoying. The overall interface loaded faster on subsequent searches, but the little images it puts in still load far too slowly.

Michael

Terrible, Terrible, Terrible. Did I mention Terrible?

I’ll look past the slow-loading because I know a lot of people are checking it out right now. However, what I can’t look past is the non-existent results, the poor format, and the mis-respresentation that Cuil has more pages than Google. How could they even compare themselves to Google? They aren’t even in the same universe.

I don’t even care too much for Google, and I was really looking forward to Cuil bringing something new and fresh to the table. All they did was offer a substandard search engine, a lot of hype, and they should be extremely embarrassed for going live with such an inferior service.

“Cuil” is NOT “Cool”.

Tyrone D.

Why do companies like these even try to come into the “search game”? Microsoft (the biggest software company) and Yahoo (one of the best and oldest web portals around) can’t beat Google, these “new guys” think they can?